My-Life

I had a nice two day trip to Paihia over weekend. Paihia is one of key tourist towns far up in North. It took around 4 hrs via bus from Auckland. Travel was quite comfortable and place was excellent. I would say Paihia itself was quite a nice place but travel to it was one of best scenic travel I ever had. [gallery link=“file” ids=“3895,3896,3898,3897,3901,3902”]  

I travelled via Inter-city bus. Outside India it’s quite common that just one person takes care of everything on behalf of bus company. Same person works on loading stuff, verifying tickets, and of course driving bus. Most of societies outside India are extremely cool & calm which makes overall service quite doable. Not surprising - same person drove the bus back to Auckland next day and the way he kept on updating, greeting all passengers was just amazing. I never had Haryana roadways folks greeting like that. ;) And oh yes did I mentioned of free wifi in the bus? :)   Although I have yet to upload most of videos I took on the way, here’s a quick video showing way from Auckland to Paihia.

Out in Mumbai to attend SANOG 26.

Meet and greet if you are attending as well or around in Mumbai. :)

Some updates from personal life…

I have joined Fremont based IP backbone & colocation provider - Hurricane Electric and would be working on some cool things at AS6939. :)  

Updates on blog…

I have changed theme and entire look of blog and re-designed it with new plugins, more tweaking etc. As of now blog has more cleaner while theme which gives more space for posting, improved security with some ACLs, forced HTTPS to avoid telcos from injecting iframe in readers on 3G networks (which is very bad and worrying). Also, with use of bunch of plugins, now my I am hosting all static media content on AWS S3 to avoid local storage on server, it’s backup etc. Running it on AWS S3 with Geo replication + Cloudfront for CDN/efficient delivery made much more sense. Though sad that there’s no easy way for integration of Google Cloud storage with wordpress. S3 being more mature product makes it easier.

On one of key updates from my life - I have decided to exit from Spectranet AS10029. Overall it was fun working at Spectranet but the same time it was very different experience. I loved most of time I spent here and it was great learning experience.

Back on work to finish off my notice period!  

no router bgp 10029
delete local-as 10029

It has been very interesting as well as very busy times in life. There have been lot of developments at my job end where I am spending almost 14-15hrs a day but at the same time I think I should start blog posting again.  

Starting with a non-technical topic this time…

Why incompetent leaders are dangerous?

A close friend asked me sometime back and I happen to have interesting experiences with those “incompetent leaders”. The context of this question was that my good friend was offered a job in a good company, good salary, interesting work but under a highly incompetent leader. So should he proceed for it or not? My reply to him was immediate no, while my other friends (since it was group discussion) were in favor of it considering it.  

And I am back in India after a long Europe trip and enjoying food again ;)

Some quick updates from Professional life

1. I have quit from my job at PCH and won’t have an active full time involvement anymore.
2. It is always nice to work under great leadership - at PCH it was Mr Bill Woodcock and I thoroughly enjoyed learning lot of things from him. 
3. This situation always brings me to hard thoughts where you really want to stay in an organization and work under a leader you like but get into a mis-match of Organization’s requirement and goals with your personals goals and what you like doing etc. 
4. I am joining National Indian ISP  - Spectranet / Citycom Networks as full time job and will be working with Network Planning & Operations team of Spectranet AS10029. 
5. I will be working on multi-gigabit multi-homed core network of Spectranet AS10029 in optimization, upgradation as well as day to day operations of backbone. 
6. This would be “officially” my first job with an Indian company. Closest I had earlier was my internship in Chennai based Zohocorp during my 1st year summer break at college. 

That’s all for updates for now. Ending this post with a nice selected scenic view from my Europe trip :)

My Europe trip is going good (so far!). Interesting experiences in meeting people across half a dozen of countries. 

Few key things I noticed so far:

1. Food is a much bigger problem for a vegetarian like me in Europe then in a English speaking country like US or Singapore. Living on fruits, dry fruits, bread etc from Sunday and do feeling slightly weak. 
2. Non-veg food is so high that smell of pork, etc in supermarket makes me to literally lose senses. 
3. Internet connections are “awesome” almost everywhere. I get 4-5Mbps at free wifi hotspots and 15-20Mbps at hotel/offices/dorms etc. 
4. Public transport is lot better than that of US. This is one major drawbacks of California while for other areas in US it isn’t impressive anyways. 
5. Pre-paid cell phone connections are relatively cheap and one can get them easily for pretty low price. 
6. Public peering and availability of layer 2 media is lot more in Europe then anywhere else in world!
7. European folks travel a lot for fun. Something which we don’t really see in India. :)
8. Smoking, consumption of drugs seems lot more common and bigger fashion out here as compared to any other part of world I have been to so far. 
9. Place is somewhat less secure as compared to US. 
10. Popular place are full of lines e.g I stood in line for getting entry to Eiffel Tower in Paris. 

And a quick blog post from Delhi airport. Time for my trip to Europe. This is going to be a super interesting trip with lot of roaming and meeting around.  If you are in Schengen area and want to say hi! then just buzz me! :)

Off to Europe for sometime!

It has been few days since I am out of college. Was trying to put this blog post but wasn’t getting time for that. Earlier this month I visited Radaur with my father and vacated my room. It was an interesting experience of staying in that room for a while and working on so many things from there. This is how my room used to look like: Overall time was a long time and an experience full of surprises, fun times, bad times, very bad times and more importantly learning about life. In terms of learning - I learned bit of technical stuff related to networking, along with non-technical learning like understanding how world works, what makes people work, what makes people not to work etc. :)

Exam days still going and a few more to go. Before I go further on actual blog topic, a small story to share.  

“Being a Superman” story ;)

Recently it rained quite heavily in Radaur and I was trapped in a situation where stairs to my room got in touch with live grid electricity due to a badly insulated wire joint.  Stairs are made of metal and that brought this dangerous situation. I was informed about “current in stairs” from someone living in neighbourhood who accidentally touched stairs while it was raining. Next, I had to get down from there to go to my home. There was just no other option, and waiting for an electrician to figure it out was impractical idea. There was no option of turning down main power switch since leak was before switch in main line. At this point I gave some engineering thoughts.